For many years now, classical archaeologists have learned to no longer interpret visual representations from the ancient Greek and Roman world under a purely artistic or aesthetic perspective, as objects of art history, but rather to understand and analyze them as visual media embedded in specific cultural, historical, and social contexts, which framed and determined the perception of images in antiquity. The discomfort with art-historical approaches originated in a surge of interest in cultural and social history in the 1980s fueled by Michel Foucault's analysis of historic discourses and the rise of semiotic concepts in cultural anthropology (in the wake of Clifford Geertz). Based on such approaches, there developed a renewed interest in cultural history, as well as the histoire des mentalités (particularly in France, Germany, and Italy), and finally, since the early 1990s, the emergence of German Bildwissenschaft in the course of what has been called the ‘pictorial’ or ‘iconic turn.’

Among the various attempts to reintegrate images into a history of visual communication in Greco-Roman antiquity and to re-establish visual media as a key source for writing cultural history, one of the likely most successful endeavors has been the numerous contributions provided by a group of classical archaeologists and philologists based at various academic institutions in Paris, but centered around the towering figure of Jean-Pierre Vernant – the so-called ‘Paris school,’ as this group has been called by many colleagues in the field, but never by any of its protagonists. Despite the methodological diversity of its members, they seemed to be for outsiders a comparatively homogeneous group, since most of them were focusing in their research on a ‘relecture’ of Greek vase images and shared to a lesser or more obvious extent semiotic analysis as their methodology, but, of course, denied – as decent semioticians always do – that they have ever heard about semiotics at all. Their new project of interpreting images was launched by the now notoriously famous exhibition ‘La cité des images,’ which toured in the 1980s through many European universities and museums, and which indeed changed the way we look at images in the field of Classical Archaeology.